Friday, May 18, 2012

Intolerance

Intolerance is a 1916 American silent film directed by D. W. Griffith and is considered one of the great masterpieces of the Silent Era. The three-and-a-half hour epic intercuts four parallel storylines each separated by several centuries: (1) A contemporary melodrama of crime and redemption; (2) a Judean story: Christ’s mission and death; (3) a French story: the events surrounding the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572; and (4) a Babylonian story: the fall of the Babylonian Empire to Persia in 539 BC.

Intolerance was made partly in response to criticism of Griffith's previous film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), which was attacked by the NAACP and other groups as perpetuating racial stereotypes and glorifying the Ku Klux Klan

Intolerance and its unorthodox editing were enormously influential, particularly among European and Soviet filmmakers. Many of the numerous assistant directors Griffith employed in making the film — Erich von Stroheim, Tod Browning, Woody Van Dyke — went on to become important and noted Hollywood directors in the subsequent years.

The pictured set was featured in the video game LA Noire as a historical monument and as a major scene in two of the cases in the game.

A replica of an archway from the Babylon segment of the film serves as an important architectural element of the Hollywood and Highland shopping center in Los Angeles (built in 2001).